Rushing back with flowers, I found a bucket to fill them up in, and led my parents to dinner. Using my super cool VIP status, I broke ALL of the rules and let my family in to eat with the performers, so that they wouldn’t have to wait in line, and so that they would be able to relax a little before going to the show [Where my super cool VIP status also got them reserved seating].
Okay fine. There wasn’t anything Super Cool or VIP about me. No one else cared. But serving dinner was my thing. Before I even considered myself a psuedo-maybe ACC officer, I was the Senior Head of the Food Committee. And if I were completely honest, I was the only person on the Food Committee. My three juniors were endearing at best, and apathetic at worst, but they never had the drive to actually accomplish anything without my nagging, and after a month of sending email after email, I had decided it was more efficient just to do everything by myself. Ironically, I made this decision because there was simply so much to do, feeding people on a 300 dollar budget is never an easy thing to do. Obtaining the trays, napkins, utensils, soda, and chopsticks off of the same budget made it impossible.
But you get the point. Dinner was important for me.
Dinner, was also terrifying. I had stopped caring about the dinner about two weeks before the show, because it was SO important that everything else got done. This meant no one had been working on dinner for two weeks. A dinner that we projected over one thousand people to attend. I stayed relatively calm, because I knew that we had made about 15 large trays of food earlier that day, and also because we had bought another 8 large trays, but variety was as important as amount.
I think it amused my parents to see me, all dressed up in a traditional chinese chi pao and heels, running back and forth into the concession stand to replace the trays that were emptied by the servers with more fresh food, and then back to my plate to cram an obscenely large amount of food in my mouth before I was on the move again. Well. It either amused them, or terrified them, as I was coming dangerously close to tripping and choking to death. Eventually, my mom told me she was taking the plate to my room, and I could eat after the show, because what I was trying to do wasn’t efficient and I was just running the risk of getting sick.
I was glad though, as it showed them that I’m not as useless as I seem around the house, and that, despite all of the imperfections they love pointing out, I am quite capable of making things flow smoothly.
Well. Minus the fact that I had to force feed one of the officers to make her eat, and all of the regular hustle and bustle to clear used trays and get new ones in, and all the begging of students nearly twice my size to take out trashbag after trashbag of food. But I thanked all the servers, and, as it grew closer and closer to actual show time, I gave them all instructions on how to proceed with cleanup while I was stuck backstage waiting to perform.
Because I was abusing my Super Cool VIP status, I skipped call time, with the promise that I’d eventually show up, and stayed until the crowd for dinner left. It was terrifying. We had a line of thirty people, but only 10 half filled trays left. But it worked out in the end, with 8 extra trays.
We has to ask the line to wrap down up and down an extra hall way, a line that refused to shorten for a solid hour and a half, and do to efforts that were primarily mine, we had fed them all. And everybody loved it.
It felt fantastic.
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